The company made famous by pandemic video chat has a new vision for the future of work, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said. The Verge AI avatars will one day be able to do work for you: Yuan says they'll speak in Zoom meetings, reply to emails, and answer phone calls for you, giving you a lifetime of freedom.
In this session today, ideally you don't have to participate. You can send a digital version of yourself to participate. That way you can go to the beach. Or you don't have to check your email. Your digital version can read most of your emails. Maybe one or two emails will tell me, “Eric, it's hard to respond to you in the digital version. Can you do that?” Again, we all spend a lot of time today making calls, attending meetings, sending emails, deleting spam emails, responding to text messages. And yet, we're all so busy. [do we] So how do we leverage AI with Zoom Workplace to completely automate that kind of work? That's really important to us.
Yuan's comments about the future of AI work suggest that in the future, Zoom will develop an AI avatar that looks like you, talks like you, and can make decisions that affect your work. He basically said that everything you do on Zoom or other workplace software could be automated. To be clear, there is no evidence that Zoom can do this, but Yuan would like to see his company do it. Currently, Zoom's technology in this area is AI-generated meeting summaries that keep users up to date. This is useful, but the risk is incredibly low compared to the crazy features Yuan describes.
“I really hate reading my email every morning. Ideally, I'd have an AI version of myself that reads most of my email for me,” Yuan said. “We're not there yet.”
Yuan noted that this is a vision of the distant future, but his comments come at a time of deep skepticism about AI technology and its true potential. He acknowledged that Zoom, like many other technology companies, is pushing AI harder than ever before. At the same time, the hallucinations that plague AI systems seem like an insurmountable problem for the time being. Yuan said he hopes someone will figure out hallucinations by then, even though it may be a bit counterproductive.
“I think it will be solved once we solve the AI hallucinations problem,” Yuan said, exuding great faith without offering much insight into how. When Patel asked who would solve it, Yuan replied, “Someone further down the stack.”
So in this vision, if we automate parts of a job, how do we ensure that the job doesn't get automated completely? Yuan says there are certain elements of work that can't be automated: human interaction.
If I stop by your office, give you a hug, shake your hand, right? I don't think AI can replace that. We still need that face-to-face interaction. It's so important. Let's say you and I are sitting together at your local Starbucks and we're having a really intimate conversation. AI can't do that.
While Yuan's comments shouldn't be taken at face value, his comments provide a detailed look into the direction workplace software companies like Zoom are heading in. Many enterprise software companies are actively working to automate parts of the workforce. It remains to be seen whether they'll get to this stage, but it would be naive to think that if Zoom can automate, they won't automate some work.
